Stuff You Should Know - Olive Oil: Mother Nature's Gift

Episode Date: November 15, 2018

Olive oil is one of Mother Nature's greatest gifts to humanity. Learn everything you ever wanted to know about the NUMBER ONE OIL, right here, right now.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do-do-do-do. You like that, huh?

Oh, I never get tired of the trumpet fair of Josh Clark. That's right. So that means that there's a new announcement for a new show. That's right. Fans in San Francisco and the Bay Area in general and Northern California should not be surprised that we are coming back to SF sketch fest for, what is this, four years in a row? Easily four, if not five.

Yes. It is one of our favorites. It is the premier comedy festival in the country, in my opinion. We are always super happy that our buddy Janet Barney invites us back. Yep. So on Thursday, January 17th, Chuck, we are going to be doing a Stuff You Should Know live show at the Castro, right? That is correct.

And the next day on Friday the 18th, we're both doing our own thing too. So you can see Josh and Chuck, and then Josh and Chuck. Yeah, actually, I think I'm on Saturday, but yeah. Okay. Well, mine's on the 18th on Friday, and I'm doing an End of the World live show where you can come hear me talk about the end of the world and all the reasons we should try to not let that happen. It should be pretty cool.

That's right. And I'll be doing my second ever live movie crush with very special live guest, Busy Phillips, and we'll be talking about the great, great Noah Baumbach classic film, Kicking and Screaming, one of my favorite movies. Awesome. So you can get all the information you need and tickets by going to the SF SketchFest website, and they will have schedules, tickets, all that jazz, and we will eventually have links up, I'm sure, on SYSK Live, and we will see you San Francisco in January.

Tickets go on sale tomorrow. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know, the flowing podcast of all time. Pretty great.

You're getting good at those. Oh, man. I think after 10 years, I'd actually be decent at them. You're getting good. Getting sharp. 10 years, Chuck. Good Lord. You're going on 11, dude.

Yeah. You know? Yep. It's true. Eventually, it will be 11. That's right. And then 12, and then pretty much an infinity after that, I would guess, when you say? Uh-huh.

I feel like we're almost daring each other to keep going at this point. You know? Yeah. Instead of doing that, Chuck, instead of just going on like this, let's do olive oil instead. Yeah, man. It's kind of cool that 10 and a half years in, you can still look around the world and say, or look in our pantry for that matter, and say, man, olive oil, that's a topic. Up next, those little cinnamon candy toppings that you put on cakes.

After olive oil, obviously it's just intuitive. Yeah. But Chuck, I think you should announce to everybody who wrote this article for us. Yeah. The Grabster. We've been lucky enough to get the Grabster to kind of pump out more articles for us here in the near future. Yep.

We grabbed the Grabster. That's right. It's super great because the Grabster does really good research and gives us good stuff. So we are basing this one on a Grabster article, which is just phenomenal. It's been a while. Yeah, man. So there's a lot of pressure on Ed during this entire episode, I guess, is what we're trying to say.

I think he nailed it. This is very thorough. It is. Yeah. He's good like that, man. And it is. It's so thorough, in fact, that I think we should just go ahead and start at the beginning, the very beginning, which is basically where Ed started it.

He fast forwarded a little past the cooling of the earth, but then picks up where olives actually started. And apparently in a 2013 study of chloroplast, no, chloroplast DNA genes in olives, apparently that is a part of an olive that like from tree to tree along a lineage, the DNA gets passed along so you can actually trace the lineage of trees. Some researchers traced the lineage of olives, domesticated olives, all the way back about six to 8,000 years ago, somewhere around the border between Turkey and Syria. That is where the first person said, hey, I kind of like the cut of your jib wild olives,

but I think I can make you a little better. Let me harness you and force you into domestication. Here you go, into the ground between what will eventually be Syria and Turkey. Yeah. And that's like you were saying, just when people caught on to like domesticating a wild animal, but wild olives, they've been around as long as olive trees have been around and olive trees have been around. Like there's evidence that fossilized pollen and evidence that shows that Tuk Tuk and all

is gang, we're eating olives. Right. Yeah. They were eating olives and then so were their bird friends were eating olives too. Wild olives are like, I think a little more bitter and they're smaller, which is why that early horticulturists said, I can do better, I'm a human being. I basically own this planet. So I'm going to make this olive tree do what I want it to.

And they did. And olives grew bigger and less bitter, I don't want to say sweeter because that's not quite the right word, but just less bitter, more edible. And over time, they've resulted in something like 700 different cultivars, which are cultivars with olives or with any plant. It's a version of the same species, but it has different characteristics. Yeah. Because of the human hand.

The human hand. Excuse me. Right. So when we got involved and we said, hey, let's domesticate this stuff, we did so because of those reasons, maybe we want different kinds of olives, maybe we want to scale this thing and have an olive grove and get a higher yield. Maybe you want them bigger and fatter. Maybe we want them less bitter.

So depending on who was growing them and domesticating them, it really kind of varied on what kind of olive you were going to get. But the point is, there were lots of different kinds of, and still many, many different kinds of olives. Would you say 700? 700 cultivars from what I saw. Yeah. And they're all just a little bit different from their little buddy next to them.

Yeah. At some point, somebody said, oh, I'd love to see an orange olive. No one's ever done an orange olive before and they just got to work doing that. And now we have, actually, I don't think that exists, but that's a pretty good example of what could have happened had somebody a thousand years ago said, I want to see what an orange olive looks like. We would have an orange olive cultivar. That's right.

But that's it. I mean, it's just basically different in size, shape, also the size of the tree, the shape of the tree. Olive trees. Remember in our Pando episode? Oh, how could I forget? Man, that was a good one. I love Pando.

I love Pando as well, Chuck. But we were talking about long-lived trees. Olive trees are like pretty long-lived themselves. There's a couple that are supposed to be 2,000 years old and I saw one called the Olive Tree of Vuvvesse on Crete and it's thought to be 3,000 years old and it's just a perfect tree. Have you seen it? Yeah.

The one in Crete? Yeah. Yeah. Because Crete was the seat. Crete was the seat. That's what it says on all the t-shirts. The olive seat. Right.

Back in the day, during the Bronze Age, I believe Crete was like the seat of olive oil production for the world and there's a temple at Nossos, I think that's how you say it, right? In the Case Island? Yeah. Yeah. It's not Canossos. Okay. That temple is thought to have housed, I guess at any given time, 16,000 gallons of olive

oil at any point. Like you could walk in there and you would find about 16,000 gallons in clay amphorae. Yeah. And as far as the tree goes, like you said, they generally are very old. They grow very slowly and like you said, they can range in size. It's pretty uncommon to have super tall ones because we have domesticated them to be a little bit easier to cultivate, which means smaller and shorter. Some are like shrubs sometimes.

As far as North America and South America, they are not native to our lands, although they do grow because Europeans brought them over. So now the United States and Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Australia successfully produce olive oil outside of the, obviously the Mediterranean region, which is still, I think Tunisia, Italy and Spain are the people who are really pumping that stuff out. Right. They're the leaders for sure. And the reason I mentioned our bird friends is because olives actually spread really easily.

Because I guess eat the olives, poop the seeds out, which I feel bad for a bird because all of pits are fairly big. You know? Sure. I mean, if you were, I wouldn't want to poop out an olive pit. I can imagine if I were a tiny little bird, that'd be a big ordeal, but that's how olive trees like spread. And since they thrive actually in fairly semi-arid conditions, like too much waters, not good

for them, they can survive cold snaps pretty well. They spread pretty easily and they can be grown all over the place, not just in the Mediterranean. Yeah. And Ed, I love how he put it here like basically don't take me or anyone else to task about all these dates because domestication of the olive tree and the beginnings of olive oil could have started in different places around the world at different times. And he said basically, it's not important to try and like nail down a specific date

and region because it is conflicting. And what's important is that the olive and the olive oil industry, well, I guess it's an industry now, but back then it was just called olive oil. It was super important. It wasn't just, it's not just oil, you know, it was important to religion and culture and really had a big impact on these ancient empires. Yeah. He makes the point to say like this region that produced like the world's three major

religions or two of them at least, three of them, three of the four, the big four, I'm going with that. Now the big five maybe. Jewish, Christian, Islamic and Scientology. Right. The big four. Okay. Let me just say that it produced three of the world's major religions.

Yeah. Also some of the great earliest cultures, they all came about in this place where olives and then olive oil production was pretty widespread and plentiful. And he doesn't go so far as to say like one necessarily influenced the other, but they were definitely intertwined and it's, you can make the case like, you know, they didn't say, you know, chicken eggs are for the gods or something like that. Sure. Yeah.

It's special in its own strange way to human culture, especially the earliest faint, faintest contours of human culture. Yeah. And so important that even the word OIL just for all the oils is derived from the Latin word for olive oil specifically, olium. So you could, you know, you could even say that olive oil is sort of the OG, the original oil. Right.

So Popeye's girlfriend would be olive olive oil. That's right. Or which is. Or just call her Olium for short. Yeah. Oli, that was his pet name for her. Should we take a break? I think so.

We're starting to get a little charged up, might as well defuse it and marry her. All right. We'll be back to talk about how olive oil played a part in all this culture and mythology. Let's. On the podcast, pay dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show. Hey, dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use.

Hey, dude, as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, hey, dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week

to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. And so tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right, Chuck. So as I mentioned, spoiler alert, um, Christianity is one of the world's big three religions and olive oil makes an appearance in it. Did you know that? I did. Um, well, olives do at least. Yeah. And Ed actually over delivered here, I think.

Oh, yeah, I agree. He was, he was kind of showing his stuff. He got excited. All right. But we'll go through some of these, um, obviously in the book of Genesis, if anyone's ever heard the story of Noah, um, after the flooding, Noah sends out that dove and says, Hey dude, go out there and see what's, what, what we have in store for us. What's alive?

What's dead? And give me a report. And the dove said, sure thing, Noah, and flew away and came back with an olive branch. So it, it might sound like, hmm, someone's under delivering Mr. Dove, but what that meant was is there's life out there because the olive tree is growing and everyone loves olives. Right, there you go. That was the implication. Chuck, you're basically a biblical scholar at this point.

Pretty much. But I mean, think about it, the dove carrying the olive branch, like that's almost worldwide. Somebody can point to that and be like, Oh yeah, that's, that's a good feeling is what that symbolizes. We all know what that means. That means there's a fight coming. Right. Or somebody doesn't want to fight anymore.

Right. So here's, here's an olive branch that I taped to a dove and I'm throwing it at you. What else? Oh, one of the things that struck me was that olive oil wasn't always used as food. It was used as definitely as an offering to the gods. It was portioned out very exactly and precisely and we actually have tablets with linear B writing for the Messinian culture that show that it was taken very seriously. It was like, you get this little quarter ounce of olive oil, you get this quarter ounce

of olive oil. You name here to say you got your olive oil kind of thing. And then part of it even goes to the gods. Right. Right. Yeah. That's, yeah, exactly. And they have to sign for it.

They do. Zeus. But then it was also used in bathing culture as well. Yeah. I mean, Emily has olive oil in her soap. Right. Okay. So this was a little less soapy than that.

This is a little more straightforward wherein you would take, I believe this was the Greeks, right? Romans. What's the difference? No, it was in Athens. Okay. So the ancient Athenians would use olive oil that was infused with like an herb or something like that and pour it on their body and then use a stick called the Sturgill to scrape

it off. And that was bathing. Part of bathing, I should say. I just made so many Italians and Greeks mad. Oh, because you said it's the same thing. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, Rome definitely modeled its culture almost exclusively on classical Greece.

I know. So come on. I was just joking though. Sure. They know that. Give it, give them a, I was just joking into like a stereotypical Italian accent. That'll complete it. He's just a joke.

You know? Perfect, man. So, of course, ancient Egypt was involved. It feels like anytime you're talking about some great, you know, from olive oil to peanut butter, well, not peanut butter, you can go find it on the walls of the tombs of ancient Egypt. And of course, the Romans, just like it's either the Roman Empire or the Chinese are the ones who are going to make advances by leaps and bounds.

And in terms of olive oil, it was the Roman Empire who was like really got those agricultural techniques down pat for kind of scaling it on, you know, as far as their scale goes. Plus, they were the first ones to really spread olive oil production beyond the Mediterranean and I think the Middle East because the Roman Empire spread so far. And because olive oil was such an integral part of that culture, they took olive oil basically everywhere with them and olive oil cultivation or production, olive cultivation and olive oil production went far and wide because of the Romans. That's right.

And again, one of the reasons why they were able to spread this stuff far and wide is because olive trees grow pretty well in all sorts of different climates. As long as they're not overwatered, they're going to do okay. They like bright sunlight, they're hardy evergreen shrub-like trees. But you do need a lot of water though. You can get more olives by watering them more than just neglecting them. But you don't want to over-fertilize them from what I understand. There's like a lot of, they're really low maintenance fruit-bearing trees from what

I can tell. But yes, you step up the fertilizer, you step up the water if you want to do commercial olive oil production. But if you just have like an olive tree at home and you're just growing it for fun, you can go out of town for a while and not have to worry about your olive tree. Do you know who's into this big time? Who? Chad Crowley.

He's into growing olives? Well, he's into olive oil to the point where his retirement job might be olive oil, like olive farming and growing and cultivating. Does he grow olives? No, but he's into it to a degree that I didn't fully understand until I talked to him about it. That's really cool. We should tell everybody, all the millions of people listening who don't know who Chad

Crowley is, he directed our TV show, Stuff You Should Know the TV Show. He was the director, producer. He had a lot to do with it. And that scarred him so much that he just wants to go live on an olive farm. That's pretty much right. So the fruit of the olive tree is the olive. And they ripen to black, purple, sometimes a little red. If you see a green olive, that means it's not ripe yet.

I did not know that, did you? No, because I hate olives. Yeah, that's right. I was kind of hoping that I had imagined that, but no. I don't like olives. That's crazy, man. I love olives. A lot of people don't like olives, dude.

That's crazy. Whatever. They're crazy. They're crazy. They're crazy. All of you crazy. No, it's called personal taste that we respect. I guess.

Remember? I guess. I keep forgetting when it comes to olives. Yeah. So as the oil in the olive increases as it ripens. So it's kind of a very tight line that you walk as an olive farmer because you want these things to ripen as much as possible to get the most oil, but if they over-ripen and then just start falling off the tree, they're no good.

You got to pick it off the tree. So like winemakers, it's a very stressful thing to watch that crop. I can imagine. And it comes down to sometimes the day or the hour of the day to really maximize your yield. Yeah, because if you think about it, you have an olive tree with a bunch of olives growing on it. You have to time the ripening of those olives, not under-ripe, not over-ripe, but also not

every olive on that tree is going to ripen simultaneously. So not only do you have to time it so that they're ripe, but the maximum number of olives on that tree are ripe at any given period, too. I'll bet that is super stressful farming, way more stressful than corn farming. Corn basically grows itself. You just sit around in your easy chair and say, hurry up, corn, get in your basket. Yeah. And then it just farts it off the tree right onto your plate, the stalk.

And does the little bow and says, how do you do? And you just clap from your easy chair and say, I love corn trees. So if you have a small farm and you're like an old family business in Italy, let's say, you might still be handpicking these things, which is great. But big major operations, they have what they call shaker machines, and they drive through the farm and shake the tree. Have you ever seen one of those things? Yeah.

And shaker machines are, I mean, it's not just specific to olive trees. They use them for all sorts of fruiting trees. They just shake it. They do. It's like the trees like, and then it's like, okay, that's over. It's kind of interesting to see. And then there's, I guess, a catch that catches the stuff falling off the tree. And then it shoots it up a conveyor belt over into like a truck driving beside it.

There you go. You just harvested a bunch of olives. Boom. But that's like a commercial thing. That's a commercial operation, right? If you're like a mom and pop operation, like you were saying, or if you're harvesting from very, very old trees, you would not use one of those machines. Yeah.

You wouldn't want to go to a thousand-year-old olive tree and introduce it to the shaker machine. That would be mean. That would be so mean. It's like I've seen empires rise and fall, and now some jerk has got a new haul in shaker machine running right over me. That runs on diesel. Yeah. Thanks, Todd.

So the flavor of an olive oil is going to depend on a lot of things. And olive oil and wine, they grow in similar regions a lot of times, and they have a lot of similarities, which is why often when you go to wine country, there'll be a wine shop that also sells olive oil or an olive oil store that also sells wine. And you start to wonder, where's the line? Dude, you mean I went to Calistoga in either Sonoma or Napa. I cannot remember. I think it's Napa.

And it's absolutely true. They're almost one and the same. You just go from a wine shop to an olive oil shop, but they're just, it's the most amazing olive oil you've ever tasted in your life. That's the best. So just to be clear, you hate olives, but you like olive oil, and I understand they're totally different. Oh, yeah.

I love olive oil. Okay. So have you gone to olive oil shops and just done like little shots of olive oil? Dozens and dozens. Aren't they just amazing? Yeah, man. I like the grassy kind. I like the nutty kind, but it's, and I think I've told you this before, really good olive

oil can really give me like a chemical burn on my throat. Oh, really? So it has to have like kind of a buttery quality to it, I guess, for me to really like it. Yeah. And this is the kind of olive oil that you don't, you're not like even cooking with necessarily. You're drizzling it on your salad or you're dipping your bread in it and stuff like that. Or you're injecting it for its anti-inflammatory properties. Oh, hold on.

Okay. We'll get there. All right. But that flavor, like I was saying, like wine or the grapes that make wine is affected by the soil that you grow it in, the climate, how much rain it got, the general terroir. It really can change the end product of that olive and thus that oil that you're going to get and you know, the old school oil, oil people, olive oil experts, let's say, they'll say that, you know, if you really want a great olive oil, you won't even find it on some

big mass farm. It's like you can find it the best stuff on like just an olive tree that's growing somewhere in Italy on somebody's property that wasn't necessarily raised for that purpose and it's growing alongside other kinds of trees and not like smashed together against a bunch of other olive trees. Which is basically permaculture is what he's describing. Yeah, I guess so. You know, remember the permaculture up where it was like you grow crops with around other

trees and other types, just a bunch of different types of plants together, produce better crops. Yeah. But over there, they just say it's Italy. Right. Man, they're going to really be happy with this one. I hope so. So, apparently, they also hybridize too, which explains how we've gotten 700 different cultivars of domesticated olive plants.

You just take a tree that does one thing really well, like produces big fat orange olives and you take another tree that does really well in a closet and you graft them together and now you have a tree you can keep in the closet that produces big fat orange olives and it's the biggest freak of nature olive tree anyone's ever seen. Pretty amazing. So, Chuck, I think we've kind of beat around the bush as it were the tree long enough. Let's talk about how you actually make olive oil. It's pretty cool because it's so easy in practice.

As Ed points out, it's a stone fruit, it's a droop, like a plum or a peach where you have that paracarp, that flesh on the outside and then that hard seed right in the middle that you were talking about that a bird's anus cannot handle. But unlike those other kinds of like, say, stone fruit, you don't get the oil from the seed. There's some in there. You can get some from there, but it's really hard to do. What makes olive oil different from other kind of fruit oils or vegetable oils in general

is that it doesn't come from the seed, the oil comes from the actual olive itself, which I guess it's what I would have thought, but I didn't realize that most of the oil we get comes from seeds, although it makes total sense because sunflower oil doesn't come from like the flower petals, it comes from the seeds. But olive oil is different. It stands kind of on its own in that way that you get the oil from the part of the olive you eat, the fruit. That's right and the process of getting that oil is starting startlingly, startlingly, simple.

You mash that olive, we'll call it the flesh or the paracarp. You mash that into a paste. You press that paste to get the oil and then you clean it up. There's a little bit of solids and a little bit of water left over and you remove that. What has changed over the years is how we do that because back in the day, they would use stone wheels like when you see like a donkey walking in a circle attached to a contraption. Just hate in life. Hate in life.

That's what that donkey's doing. It's rolling a big wheel in a circular path over and over all day long, smashing these olives into a pulp. That pulp's called a pomas. Then finally, in the 20th century, they started using things like steel drum grinders and this one would surprise me, hammers, mechanized hammers, which is not a good idea. No, it's not. It probably seemed like a good idea in the 50s when they introduced it and now they're

like, this makes terrible olive oil. Somebody said, I know, we'll just sell it for really cheap in the supermarket. They said, genius. Yeah, it's because of the friction, right, because heat is no good. That's why they call it cold press. Good stuff is cold pressed. Heat is no good for olive oil. It just changes the taste.

It does very much so. It introduces tastes you don't want. It can also paradoxically get rid of tastes you do want. It's not good at all to introduce heat. That's another reason why olive oil stands on its own as far as vegetable oils go. Just about every other oil you cook with, like a vegetable oil or a seed oil, heat is necessary to get the oil out of the seed. With olive oil, you don't use heat, and so it preserves a lot of the flavors that you

lose with other vegetable oils, which is why so many vegetable oils just taste exactly the same. It's like, did this all just come from the same vat where if you take a sip of olive oil, no, that's olive oil. There's no mistaking it whatsoever. Yeah. You don't want to take a sip of just standard vegetable oil. You don't want to, but you can.

No. Well, I'm sure you could, but they're not going to put that on your plate with balsamic vinegar to a restaurant with a little pepper grind on top. It depends on the restaurant. You think? Yeah. I could see it. The grinding process, you have to do this long enough so the malixation process emerges.

From what I gather, that's when actual oil is released from these cells, and then they start to combine with one another until it's recognizable oil. Is that about right? Yeah. Like tiny, tiny little particle droplets start to combine into larger fat droplets of oil, and you just get more oil out of the actual olive itself. Right. And that's just to get the pulp, pommasy pulp, or exactly called pommas.

It's not pommasy. Yeah. P-O-M-A-C-E, right? Yeah. But that's not the actual pressing of the oil. That comes next. Right. That's just the crushing of it to loosen things up, to kind of get the party started.

The pressing is number two. So the pommas or the paste is put in traditionally, it's put onto mats or like wooden boards that have holes all over it, and then stacked. So you put like say a mat down, put some of that pommas on top of it, put another mat down, put some more pommas on top, and you got a nice little stack going, and then you get a board, and then you go get Giuseppe, the human giant, to lay on top of the board and press down. Get the largest human in the village to come and sit on it.

Exactly. Right. And then that actually, you're pressing the oil from the pommas, and all that oil is collected, and buddy, you've got the first hints of olive oil, and you could actually stop right there, and some people do. Yeah. And of course, the first thing you started doing was hydraulic presses because Giuseppe was busy.

There weren't enough Giuseppes to go around, I guess. That's true. But today, a centrifuge, which I didn't know is used, which makes perfect sense, because you get a centrifuge spinning, and it's going to sling all that pulp to the outside, and the oil's going to separate and leave that pulp behind, and there's no heat whatsoever. They still call it cold pressing, even though it's not even being pressed, which is interesting. Yeah, I guess it's true. I hadn't thought about that.

Like, they don't call it cold-spun olive oil. They could, I guess, but they still call it cold press, so when you see it on the bottle, that's what that means. There's been no heat or chemical processes to make that oil that you're about to delight in. It's all strictly mechanical. Yeah, and it doesn't take long with these centrifuges. It's like, it happens in minutes.

Yeah, almost disappointingly, like you're like, oh, it's ready. I was going to wait for a little while. So after that first press, whether it's with a centrifuge or whether it's actually pressed, you have olive oil, technically, right there. But there's usually a second step involved, because most olive oil is very clear and see-through and beautiful, maybe with a little bit of a green tint to it, most likely some sort of kind of golden color, but there's another step to get to that part. It's just basically a filtration step, and for many, many, many years, several thousand

years, I would guess, they basically just set the olive oil out to sit and filter on its own to let the water particles that were suspended in there and any little bits of solid matter from the olives left over that were still kind of floating around, they would eventually settle down to the bottom of sediment, and then everything on top was pure filtered olive oil. It's called decantation, and it took like four to 10 months to get to that point, depending on the type of olive used, right? So if you want a mass market olive oil, you can't wait four to 10 months.

I'm sure plenty of people do, but you pay for that. That's the really, really expensive stuff that you're getting. What they figured out is you can use a centrifuge again, and you can filter out the particulate matter and the suspended water, and now you have fully filtered decanted olive oil that's ready for market. That's right. Then you've still got this pulp leftover, this stuff that you've extracted the oil, but there's still a little bit of oil in there, and they want to use everything.

So this is when they actually use this heat, they use heat in a chemical process to get every single bit of that oil out, and that oil is not something you want to ingest. That's called lampante, and that is like fuel oil, and I love that it always puts in there in the industry. If you call someone else's olive oil lampante, that's what Ed calls a sick burn. Right, you're saying that their olive oil is inedible. It's only good to be used it for fuel oil. Yeah, man.

That's pretty rough. It really is. I think so too. Giuseppe would smash if he heard you call his olive oil lampante. Giuseppe smash. So you want to take a break and then come back and talk about whether olive oil is healthy or not? Yes, and yes.

It is. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh.

Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. And so tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, so everybody knows olive oil is healthy unless you've read articles

that say that it's not healthy. It's just, it's like, there's very few things that, that demonstrate terrible science slash nutritional reporting than olive oil. It's all just very sensationalist. Yeah. Here's the deal. Olive oil is, is a much better alternative than most other oils. Mm-hmm.

It is a, uh, a monosaturated fat, which is always better than a saturated fat. It will, it'll reduce your LDL cholesterol, which is the bad stuff. And so if you're replacing other oils with olive oil, they will say things in studies like, um, you have a reduced rate of cancer or cardiovascular disease. Or inflammation. Yeah, it'll help reduce inflammation, which we talk a lot about, uh, has vitamin E and vitamin K. And, uh, all those things are good for you, but it's like, that, that can't be good enough to the writers of health books and newspaper articles or web articles, right?

Because they champion it as this miracle oil, uh, that will make you live forever and lose weight all at the same time. And that's not the case. Right. And it really kind of ascended in the modern West in the nineties, thanks to the Mediterranean diet, which is basically like, look at the Italians, look at how much pasta they eat. And they're all skinny and healthy and they live forever. What's going on over there?

Yeah. What's going on over there is the answer. There is, but a lot of people settled on, you know, olive oil is the key. It's the magic potion, as it were, right? Right. Um, it's not, it's, it's good for you, but it's good for you in the sense that if you're eating something and you're going to be using like vegetable oil, canola oil, and you're replacing it with olive oil, you've made a very good decision.

If you sit around and just eat olive oil by the tablespoon all day long, that's bad for you. That's, that's, that's too much of a good thing. It's more, olive oil is really good standing for stuff that's far, far less healthy than olive oil is. Yeah. And like, uh, if you're on the Mediterranean diet and you say, and look into those Italians, you know, they're eating fish and they're drinking red wine and they're eating lots of

fiber and they're walking up and down the steepest hills on planet earth and they're uh, strolling the shores of Lake Cuomo and have a great family structure, like low stress, like all these things combined, it's not like they shouldn't even call it the Mediterranean diet. They should call it being Mediterranean. Right. That's right. And you can't be from Atlanta and slurp down some olive oil and then pretend you're from

the shores of Lake Cuomo. Right. Now where's that bag of pork cracklings? Exactly. So it is healthy, but just don't, we can't over, or it shouldn't be overstayed. How healthy it is. Right. But on the other hand, there have been studies that say, no, no, no.

Not only is olive oil not healthy, it's actually bad for you. Yeah. I don't know about that. Those have not been born out in follow-up studies, but the basis of that whole line of thinking was that when you apply heat to olive oil, e.g. cook it or IE cook it, I'm sorry everyone who loves Latin, that you're actually creating toxic compounds in the olive oil. So you're actually hurting yourself. That apparently is not the case, that the amount of heat that we apply to olive oil

to cook isn't enough to actually build up toxic compounds. And if anything, olive oil's smoke point is high enough, higher than other kinds of vegetable oils, that it actually is less likely to build up any kind of toxic compounds through cooking. So the jury is still out as it is on just about everything we understand about nutrition. But from what we can understand, olive oil is not actually bad for you. Agreed. Okay? It's not a super, it's not going to give you lasting life, but it's also probably not

going to bring you to an early grave either. Yeah. Okay. That's a great experience. So when it comes to rating olive oil, because you go to the grocery store these days and there is a wide, wide range of olive oils you can buy. And this is just in your everyday supermarket. Like I'll get some of that good stuff there to cook with, but Emily and I have a store

in Buckhead we go to, this lady that we know that makes her own olive oils. And that's where we get our good stuff. Where? Yeah. Geez, I haven't been in a while and I think she moved locations, but it's somewhere in Buckhead. Okay. There's one in Decatur too, right in downtown Decatur, a great olive oil store where you

can taste shots and stuff. Is that chads? Yeah, it probably is. But the different grades, they all have to do with the level of refinement. And in this case, the less refined the better, because that refining process is what we talked about that will strip away that flavor over time. So extra virgin is unrefined olive oil. It's cold pressed, never heated, no chemicals.

Sometimes you can find bottles that say first cold press, which means they didn't just keep pressing it. They just had the one single press. That is the good stuff. And we'll get to whether or not you can trust this in a minute, but that's the top quality. Yeah. And apparently the highest top quality extra virgin olive oil is actually unfiltered. It doesn't go through that second step to remove the water suspended in a little particulate

matter. It's unfiltered extra virgin olive oil. As far as health is concerned, if it is a healthy product, this is the bestos, the greatest health benefits. That's right. And supposedly is the tastiest. That's right. Then there's virgin olive oil, which apparently I've never seen in real life.

It's apparently very, very rare, but it's unrefined, but not as high quality as extra virgin olive oil. Yeah. Maybe it's just, what's the point? So people don't even make it. Right. I don't know. And then there's straight up olive oil.

If you've ever picked up a bottle of olive oil, like say in the supermarket and been like, what, 99 cents? That's a great price on olive oil. And you're looking all over the label turning it into a pro. You can't quite find where it says extra virgin anywhere and it just says olive oil. What you have is, that's the great of it, olive oil or pure olive oil. And it's been bleached and lye has been added to it. It's been heated, filtered, smacked around, just treated very, very poorly and then ended

up on your grocery store shelf for 99 cents. You can use that on your bicycle chain. Yeah. There you go. And that's about it. So if you go to a terrible restaurant and they ran out of canola oil, they might use this kind of olive oil for your little plate with some bread. Then you have light olive oil.

This is more refined even, basically no flavor. And we should mention though that that standard olive oil, sometimes they do mix in a little extra virgin to give it a little flavor and try and charge a dollar 19. Yes. But they probably call it extra virgin olive oil. Yeah. Well, again, we'll get there. Okay.

Don't believe the hype, everybody. But the light olive oil basically has no flavor and it is not lighter in calories. So that's somewhat misleading. That's a big deal because you would think that if somebody sees a bottle of light olive oil, I would think like, oh, it's good. It's diet olive oil. It says ways less. Right, exactly.

Apparently in here we start to get, so there's also pommes olive oil, which that's Lompante. It's not for eating, it's for burning, basically. Yeah. And then organic, like with a lot of organic things, there's no standard enforcement body for organic in the case of olive oil. So maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but there's definitely, you shouldn't bank on that. But that kind of opens the door to this controversy in the olive oil world, like where if somebody can slap organic on their olive oil bottle and charge you more for it, but there's no

way for you to verify that it is organic. There's nobody watching things like that, even though there's the International Olive Oil Council and the North American Olive Oil Association. And both of them are the standard bearers for the olive oil industry, but they're just not big enough and I guess their teeth aren't quite sharp enough to regulate this giant industry that's really boomed since the 90s. So there's nobody with the ability to actually make sure that the olive oil that's being sold is, say, like the purest extra virgin olive oil actually is extra virgin olive oil

or is even olive oil at all. It could just be like plain old vegetable oil that has nothing to do with olive oil and never has with just a little bit of extra virgin olive oil mixed in for taste. Yeah, because, I mean, they use, they have standards, they have like actual standards for the number of chemicals, minimums and maximums and stuff like that, but it really comes down to human tasters, people that actually taste this stuff and say, no, this is metallic or muddy, there's no way this is extra virgin olive oil, fail. Or fusty, that's another one, I love that word.

Yeah, fusty. That's a real word. This olive oil is fusty. But there just aren't enough mouths on these, in these associations to keep up with the massive, massive industry that is the olive oil industry. And so the most pessimistic people out there will say 80% of the olive oils that say extra virgin are not, right, 80%. And that's again, the most pessimistic, but I mean, let's just say it's 50, 50.

That's terrible. Yeah, it really is, because, I mean, and it's terrible for a couple of reasons, one, you're getting ripped off. I mean, you might be paying for olive oil that is just not up to snuff and it's not as good as you think it is. That's bad enough. But if you're getting olive oil because you want to be healthier, right? And it turns out that it's not only good, not good olive oil, it's not even olive oil.

You're not getting those health benefits. You may even be eating something more than you should, and it's actually just vegetable oil, which is actually not good for you in any way, shape, or form really. That's just bad. So you're getting ripped off and you're being abused health wise. Yeah, and it's, I mean, we kind of made fun of the 99 cent bottle that says extra virgin olive oil, but you can get the $14 bottle and that could be fake. It's not just the little cheapies.

I mean, that's a pretty good warning sign, but you would think that if you paid for the $15 bottle next to the $7 bottle, that that's the real deal and that's not always the case either. Right. It's really BS. I know. I didn't run across how you can be sure, but I think there is no way to be sure. I bet do a little research on your own.

Find out about, get a few brands that you know are doing the right thing and seek those out. And I want to say, well, if you go to Sonoma or Napa or Provence or somewhere where they know what they're talking about with olive oil, you'd have to have like iron cahones to open up a high-end olive oil shop and sell vegetable oil. So surely that'd be a good place to do it. But then remember, there was that whole Mass Brothers chocolate thing where they were just selling like melted down Hershey's to everybody for like eight bucks a bar and everybody went

for that. So I don't know. I would guess you would have to befriend an olive oil producer who you knew and trusted. Maybe let them hold some of your money for a little while, see what they did with it. And then when they gave it all back a couple of years down the road, then you could confidently start buying olive oil from them. And that's the only way or just maybe we'll throw Chad a little seed money and partner with them.

Sure. And then we'll just have our own supply. He's a trustworthy guy for sure. Yeah. Okay, cool. There we go. Nice. And then the final thing we got to talk about, and again, I think Ed did a thorough job,

but I feel like we could do like three or four more shows on olive oil. Why not? But we're not going to. But the final thing here is olive oil is great. We all love it. It's the best oil to me, aside from sesame oil, which I also love. But it is not great for the environment. The mass production of olive oil has some pretty big drawbacks to it.

Yes. I had no idea about this. Yeah. And it made me like go, oh man, I knew there was a catch. Always something. Always something. So when you produce olive oil, that stuff that you press all the oil out of, the leftover olives, that's called olive cake.

And apparently one of the things that's left over from this stuff are phenols, which polyphenols are actually kind of good for you. Phenols can be toxic. They can be irritants. They can be really bad for you if you ingest them orally. And when you make olive oil, you have all this leftover olive cake, and when you spread it out there in the fields to just kind of get rid of it, it runs off and contaminates the local water supply.

The water that's used to create olive oil, it uses a ton of water. And the wastewater can actually be treated in typical municipal wastewater plants because it's too toxic. Yeah, that's bad. This does not mean that your olive oil is toxic. It's the stuff left over or that comes from the production of olive oil that can be toxic to people and bad for the environment. So yeah, there's like a big environmental impact, especially in small rural areas where

the whole local economy depends on olive oil. They don't have the means to dispose of this stuff properly, where it has the real environmental impact, but it's bad for everybody. Just because it doesn't impact you over here where you're enjoying the olive oil doesn't mean you're not also still responsible for the impact that's going on halfway across the world where the olive oil is being produced. Isn't it amazing that they can treat human poop wastewater, but not olive oil wastewater? I know.

It is. We can put a man on the moon who can poop up there, and we can treat that, but we can't treat olive oil wastewater. The good news is, as we speed into the future, there are new methods of reducing the amount of waste, and there are new methods of detoxification for that waste to be a little less harmful. And they're looking at other things that they can do to help put some of that waste to actual use like as fuel or stuff like that. So I mean, they're trying to get it under control, but it is a black eye for sure.

They are feeding as much as they can to Giuseppe, who's just ingesting it and metabolizing this stuff, but he can only eat so much. Poor Giuseppe. You got anything else? No. Although I have a feeling if I traveled through southern Italy, somebody would grab me at some point and say, hey, come on, sit on the olives. Will you be the Giuseppe standing?

Sure. Do that in a second. If you tour southern Italy, bring me back some olive oil, will you? Okay. Okay. Well, if you want to know more about olive oil, you can't. There's nothing more to know because egg covered it all for us. Good job, Ed.

You can type the words olive oil into the search bar of your favorite search engine, and it will bring up a whole world of stuff for you. Just beware. Remember, about 80% of it is not real. Since I said that, it's time for listening to mail. Oh, no, it's not. You know what it's time for. Oh, yeah?

You want me to say it? Yeah. Administrative details. That's right, Josh. This is when we thank listeners for small tokens and large tokens of love and appreciation they have sent to us here at the Atlanta office. I'm going to start it off with Laurie from Minneapolis, Minnesota, who very sweetly sent my daughter a Frida Kahlo action figure because I talked about how much she loved

Frida Kahlo, and she loves, loves, loves it. Thank you, Laurie. Thank you, Laurie. That was very nice of you. I'm going to start off with Jim Syus and the Crown Royal team who styled us out again with some fifths of Crown Royal and some very cool rocks glasses that have like the little crown on the pillow, like in a hologram etched in the middle. Yeah, and it weighs like a pound and a half.

Yeah, it's got some real heft to it, plus they sent us candy, too, which is pretty nice. That was very nice. John Nordskog sent us, boy, remember John, he sent us the, he calls it a code wheel. What we should probably do is just put a picture of this thing up. He built it for, I think, a Boy Scout troop and then repurposed it as a wonderful gift for us. But it is, we now have it hanging up on the wall of the office, John. We finally got it up.

It is this huge handmade thing of wonder, of interlocking gears and cranks that turn and eventually we'll spit out a paper code. I don't even fully understand it yet, but it looks like something from the ancient past. Yeah. And it's just pretty amazing. It looks really cool in our office. It's daunting.

Yes, and yeah, we can't understand it, so it's definitely going to be a wall piece from now on. Yeah, and imagine John's been a fortune shipping that thing, too, so many, many thanks, John. Yeah, and I think we thanked John last time, but that was a far better thank, so way to go, John. We got a lot of great gifts when we went to Australia for our tour. Oh, yeah. One of them was Janet from Nano Girl Labs in New Zealand, gave us a beautiful hard cover

edition of their book, Nano Girl Labs book, The Kitchen Science Cookbook. You can look up kitchensciencecookbook.com and it has all these different recipes in it. And each recipe is a science experiment that uses ingredients that are super easy to find and super cheap. And it turns out Janet, the chief operations engineer for Nano Girl Labs, has been listening to us since her teens, since she was in her teens. So I feel old, but thank you very much for that awesome book.

Yes, for sure. Emily Kuhl and Joseph Baxter sent us an invitation to their wedding in Idaho. Nice. Mazel Tov. Wish we could have gone. And Cam and Sonya, so they came to our Melbourne show, and remember they gave us the Tim Tams and the eight-year-old Tawny Port. Oh, yeah.

So we could do grown-up Tim Tams slams. And I tell you, that's the only way to do Tim Tams slams. It's with Tawny Port. It's amazing. If you don't know what Tim Tams are, go to your local world market and buy some and thank me later. Yes, for sure. Krista Allen-Steen, Sintas Art.

Here's what she does. She takes prints of atlases, roadmaps and stuff like that, and then paints over them with little sort of throwback kitschy motel signs. And she sent us the Ohio and Georgia because you're from Toledo and I'm from Georgia. That's right. They're very cool. Yeah, thank you for those. Jack Hawkins works at Starward Whiskey.

Remember that? The Starward Whiskey that we got at the Melbourne show. We got some from him, and it is beautiful stuff. You can check it out at starward.com.au. Allison Gallagher, she's one of my movie crush buddies. She sent me a mug. So this is probably a movie crush thing of Triceratops that says crushing it. Nice.

That's awesome. It's very cool. This has to do with movies, but I don't know if it was movie crush. Bill Wagoner sent us the DVD of Mongol. Oh, yeah. Remember that one? That was for us. There was one version of the Genghis Khan story that didn't star somebody like Omar

Sharif or the Duke. That's right. It was actually a good movie. I haven't watched it yet, but I'm looking forward to it. Ben Floor, F-L-O-R-Cynus. This is very cool. Reusable carbon fiber drinking straws. Plastic straws are a very cause de jour.

People should stop using them as much as possible. I saw a little stat the other day that said they take like 10 minutes to make, 20 minutes to use and stay in the environment forever. So Ben has a company called Luster, L-U-S-T-I-R, where he makes these carbon fiber drinking straws. They come in a little carrying case that you can just throw in your car, your purse. And if you like to drink out of straws, then you can carry it around and bring your own straw and say, no, thank you, I have my own straw.

Yeah. It'd be like medieval times where everybody had to walk around with their own spoon and if you lost your spoon, you starved to death. That's right. Big thanks to Brad Ashmore for sending us his book of short, weird fiction. Had he worn a different body? Ooh. I remember that one.

Angela from Tasmania sent some lovely, lovely knitted hats from Australian wool. Nice. Thank you, Angela. We got an awesome drawing of us from Eugene Gorman. He did an awesome pencil drawing of us, and you can see it and all of his other stuff on Instagram at Gorman Eugene. Check them out. John D sent us hand-painted portraits.

You can go to johnd.com, actually, johnd.com to check out his art. Thanks, John. Those are very cool. The last one I've got is from Ryan N, the 30-year-old engineer who apparently still tells people his age when he says hi. He sent in a pack of pilot friction erasable pens. They disappear with heat and reappear in the freezer, and they are pretty awesome. So thanks a lot, Ryan.

That's pretty cool. I'm still a G2 guy, but those are nice pens. All right. I just got a couple more. William Dawson sent ukulele for music teachers and music therapists. There's a book that he put together about how the ukulele can be used as music therapy. That's awesome. And it's very cool.

And I do have a ukulele, so I'm going to take a look at that for sure. You got a future side career ahead of you then. And then finally, of course, our buddies, Hilary and Mike, Lozar, Sinus, along in their collaboration with Flathead Lake Cheese in Montana. They sent us Stuff You Should Know, Stuff You Should Know Specific, Hoppin' Mad Gouda Cheese. So good. And we always get that Flathead Lake Cheese from them every year, and it's just super,

super kind. It's the most wonderful time of the year. It is. When we get that cheese. Also, I want to say, we haven't heard from Little Bit Suites in a long time. I hope they're doing all right, hint, hint. Yeah, I'll hit her up. It's been a minute.

Nice to. Well, if you want to send us something that is very nice of you, but you don't have to send us anything, you can just drop a line to say hi. You can go to our website, StuffYouShouldKnow.com, and check out all of our social links. You can find me hanging out on my website, thejoshclarkway.com, and you can send me, Jerry, Chuck, Noel, Matt, Frank the Chair, and everybody an email at StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.

On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.